[consulting] Is this list dead?

[Morbus Iff]

> Code, incredible quality or not, has little effect on whether a site is 
> successful, either financially or popularly. A site is successful based 
> on the community that develops around it. Sure, if the site is unusable 
> due to bugs, a community can't form, but bugs have no qualms existing in 
> poor, rich, awesome, or crap code. Most MMORPG players (like Everquest, 
> Anarchy Online, World of Warcraft, etc.) stay around long after they're 
> bored with the game (read: site), solely because of the community 
> (guild, server, etc.) they belong to.

And, yes, this certainly /does/ play into the idea of "if community, not 
code, is the determination of success, what does it matter if the code 
is freely available for anyone to try?"

In my case, the answer is quite simply:

  * I have a "vision", and I'd like to see /my/ vision play out
    before other people fuck it up with their own stupid ideas ;)

  * There's not enough community to go around. Twenty of the same
    site would harm each and every one of us. I'd much rather see a
    single, popular, implementation and then watch it spider off
    into splinter cells (and yes, this /is/ part of the design doc
    and business plan, which is why end-user documentation is
    /already/ being written).

  * A large community is what'll make this "vision" "work". If
    there are too many choices to start, no single choice will
    become large enough to be enjoyable.

  * As I said before, the "vision" is a lowest common denominator
    type of thing: everyone has an idea of how it could work. My
    particular "vision" could be quite different than yours, and
    it's unlikely you'd use the code base without a large amount
    of rework (or writing of your own 100 page design doc, for
    instance). This rework would be so specific as to be an
    irrelevant contribution /back/ to the project, making a chief
    benefit of the open source ideal less than awesome.

Now, it's important to note that my decision to NOT open source it was 
not a snap decision. In fact, I wrote back in 2000 that stuff like this 
SHOULD be open sourced. Open source is an inevitability for this project 
(whether it be a "failure" or if it just simply reaches "end of life"), 
but I'd like to see a non-developing community form around it first, for 
the reasons described above.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( morbus == grumblestiltskin )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
aim: akaMorbus / skype: morbusiff / icq: 2927491 / jabber.org: morbus